"Say not that honor is the child of boldness, nor believe thou that the hazard of life alone can pay the price of it: it is not to the action that it is due, but to the manner of performing it."-- Akhenaton

"My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down."-- Louisa May Alcott

"If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your hands from slaves, burden not your children or country with them."-- Richard Allen

"A dramatist is usually thought of as a slightly benighted child of nature who somehow or other did it all on a Ouija board."-- Maxwell Anderson

"Do it no matter what. If you believe in it, it is something very honorable. If somebody around you or your family does not understand it, then that's their problem. But if you do have a passion, an honest passion, just do it . . ."-- Mario Andretti

"None but a mule denies his family."-- Anonymous

"If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals."-- Susan B. Anthony

"The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants."-- Aristotle

"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well."-- Aristotle

"I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror and my family can look at me too and that's all that matters."-- Lance Armstrong

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof." -- Richard David Bach

"Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other."-- Francis Bacon

"Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive."-- Stella Benson

"I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on."-- Ugo Betti

"We are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond."-- Gwendolyn Brooks

"I have always looked at life as a voyage, mostly wonderful, sometimes frightening. In my family and friends I have discovered treasure more valuable than gold."-- Jimmy Buffet

"One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family."-- Robert C. Byrd, US Senator

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."-- George Burns

"I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other - I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so."-- Samuel Butler

"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home."-- Chinese Proverb

"Govern a family as you would cook a small fish - very gently."-- Chinese Proverb

"In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present."-- Tao Le Ching

"If you don't know [your family's] history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree."-- Michael Chrichton

"What families have in common the world around is that they are the place where people learn who they are and how to be that way."-- Jean Illsley Clarke

"That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional."-- Laurie E. Colwin

"To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right."-- Confucius

"The presidency is temporary-but the family is permanent."-- Yvonne De Gaulle

"It used to take courage--indeed, it was the act of courage par excellence--to leave the comforts of home and family and go out into the world seeking adventure. Today there are fewer places to discover, and the real adventure is to stay at home."-- Alvaro de Solva

"It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations."-- Charles Dickens

"As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there."-- John Donne

"But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man."-- George Eliot

"Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better."-- George Eliot

"There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent."-- T. S. Eliot

"A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There are books. . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A small family is soon provided for."-- English Proverb

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material."-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too."-- Benjamin Franklin

"The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended."-- Robert Lee Frost

"A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body."-- Margaret Fuller

"Where can a person be better than in the bosom of their family?"-- Marmontel Gretry